


before you came into my life i missed you so bad

by notcaycepollard



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Bisexual Skye | Daisy Johnson, F/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, god I love soulmark AU, mentioned Phil/Audrey, mentioned Skye/Miles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-12-08
Packaged: 2018-04-21 11:23:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4827266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notcaycepollard/pseuds/notcaycepollard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coulson joins SHIELD, because unmarked, untethered, a young man alone in the world, what's to stop him? Belonging somewhere is better than belonging to nobody at all, he thinks.</p>
<p>A mark doesn't mean belonging, it means a thing someone's got on you, a tether to you, a link you can't fight. Skye can fight everything: the school, the system, all the rules of St Agnes. She doesn't want to fight fate, she just wants it to leave her alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AMidnightVoyage](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMidnightVoyage/gifts).



Coulson doesn't remember, really, exactly when he stopped expecting to get his mark. It wasn't when his father died; even through the confusion and childish grief of a nine-year-old, he watches the way his mom is grieving, the way she presses her fingers to the fading mark on her knee like she can keep his dad there with them, and he catalogues it, yearns for it in a way he won't understand until he's much later. He wants to feel half of a whole.

It doesn't happen when he's ten, or when he's fifteen, or when he's twenty. His mother dies, and he joins SHIELD, because unmarked, untethered, a young man alone in the world, what's to stop him? Belonging somewhere is better than belonging to nobody at all, he thinks. It could still happen. A twenty-year age gap isn't so much. He'll only have to wait another twenty years. Or he could have a lifemark, at least, someone he could love platonically but without question or fear, someone who'd have his back the whole way.

He's thirty by the time he's mostly resigned to the idea that it's not going to happen. His peers are marrying, having children, and he jokes about being married to SHIELD. He's a good agent. He throws himself into it with mostly good will, because he's idealistic and he does think they're making a difference. It's something, at least. He doesn't have lifelong friends, or lovers, but he has good agents, and sometimes that's enough.

Barton brings Romanoff in from Russia, and Coulson watches how she looks furious and bone-deep exhausted from fighting her conditioning, and even more furious about Barton not taking the shot. They put her in something halfway between a bunk and a cell (because what is she? They don't quite know) and he watches her dispassionately through one-way glass, the way she presses her fingers against the silver lifemark bright and solid on her breastbone, just where an arrow would have hit and sunk heart-deep. He thought maybe spies were better alone, but the way she traces the shape makes his own heart ache. It feels monstrously unfair that the universe hasn't even given him  _this_. Barton vouches for Nat, but Coulson thinks he would have given her the chance just to see what she'll do with this tenderness.

Ten years later, she's one of their best agents, and she and Barton are an eternal pain in the ass, and she's one of the people Coulson likes most in the world. She and Clint come to his house for dinner every six months or so, and Coulson thinks he doesn't just have good agents, he has friends, even if they're not tied together by silver. Nat's inscrutable and Russian and carefully observant, and the way she looks at him, he thinks she knows he's unmarked. Clint just asks, eventually, like an asshole, and Coulson gives him a long look, reconsiders that whole thing he was thinking about friends.

At forty, he thinks that this is it. Any soulmate born now, he'd be an old man by the time they were old enough, and what twenty-year-old would want a sixty-year-old career agent whose main attributes are "wearing a suit" and "being quietly, blandly professional at everything"? He contemplates dating sites, signs up briefly for UnmarkedLove and then disables his account, because it's depressing as hell.

He's forty-seven when he's assigned to a mission in Portland, and meets the woman at the centre of it all, and thinks, god, she's lovely. She's all dark hair and big eyes and delicate bones, a fading gold lovemark like a glimmering scar on her throat and a bright silver lifemark winding a ribbon thread up the side of her bow hand, and when he watches her play for the first time, he's smitten. They're not soulmates - obviously - but she asks him for coffee, and then a drink at a tiny hipster bar, and then she introduces him to her sister, who's almost as lovely as she is, and has a silver ribbon stretching down her collarbone. Phil thinks, Audrey Nathan, I could love you, if I tried.

"I've been meaning to come to New York for the Truffaut retrospective," she tells him, when he leaves Portland, "maybe we could?"

"Yes," he says, "yes, I'd- I'd like that, yes." They go for brunch and linger over coffee for hours, and visit art galleries where he doesn't look at any of the art because she's all his eyes want to take in. He goes back to Portland as often as he can, buys season tickets to the Portland Symphony. While they're apart, he's not much one for talking on the phone, and neither is she, but she sends warm, intimate text messages that leave him smiling like a dork at his phone. Sitwell gives him shit. He doesn't care, because Audrey _delights_ him. 

After a few months, he takes her to the gravestone with his parents' names on it, and she lets him press kisses light and careful to the almost-gone mark at her throat. She never tells him her soulmate's name, but she murmurs a few details - cancer, malignant and quick, and a wedding that would have happened this July, if it'd happened, just four days before his birthday - and he'd feel guilty, for feeling so glad that she's here now, alone and almost unmarked, except that he's so  _happy._ It feels like happiness that can't last, maybe.

It doesn't.

Loki gets him in the heart, and he thinks, unexpectedly, of Nat pressing her fingers against a silver mark, just where the point of the scepter has pierced. He wonders if Nat's lifemark is burning cold and blue right now, if Clint's so filled up with Loki's power that it's translating back through that connection to her heart. It hurts more than he could have imagined. It's only a month before fireworks and the fourth of July and his forty eighth birthday and the holiday to Napa he and Audrey were planning. And then he thinks of himself, no soulmark, no half of a whole, just a lonely man yearning for connection, and his heart twists, and things go black.

When he wakes up in Tahiti, it seems unfair that nothing's changed, that there's no mark glimmering bright on his skin, but dying hasn't changed him  _that_ much. He supposes he was only dead for eight seconds. It's a bit much to expect the universe to create a soulmate over eight seconds of death.

 

+

 

Skye doesn't ever want a soulmark. A mark doesn't mean  _belonging_ , it means a thing someone's got on you, a tether to you, a link you can't fight. Skye can fight everything: the school, the system, all the rules of St Agnes. She doesn't want to fight fate, she just wants it to leave her alone.

When she's five, she scowls rebelliously at her skin, daring it to shine, and when it doesn't, she hugs herself to sleep, cries for a reason she doesn't have the words for. "You're all alone, Mary Sue," the other girls tease the next day, and she sticks her lip out, clenches her fists.

"So what," she demands. "Marks aren't  _family_. You're all alone too. You'll have to wait  _years_."

When she's ten, one of the other girls is placed with a foster family and doesn't come back after a month the way Skye always does. "She shares a lifemark with her foster sister. God works in mysterious ways," Sister Rebecca tells them, happy tears in her eyes, and Skye grits her jaw. She doesn't care. She bets a foster family would send her back anyway, lifemark or not. She's never a good fit.

Skye's fourteen when she scowls at the nuns' suggestion that unmarked girls should consider joining the church, dedicating their lives to their lord and savior Jesus Christ amen. Skye understands belonging, understands connection. She knows why someone would want that, would seek it out in other organizations, but she's not going to find it here. She'll  _make_ belonging, choose it for herself, not as a temporary measure or a failsafe but as something she's going to go out into the world and seek out and take with both hands outstretched.

She leaves St Agnes when she's fifteen, and spends the next five years hustling for cash, playing pool with drunk college guys and betting beers, dinner, laptops on the outcome. She spends a lot of time kissing people, because she likes it and she wants it and there's something about pressing up against someone in the dark of a club. It feels a bit like connection. She likes it even more when they have golden marks glimmering against their skin, likes wrapping her fingers across marks not meant for her and kissing their owners breathless.

She meets Amandla that way, Amandla who's a computer science major and has two marks, one gold and one silver, winding like a braid up the dark skin of her forearm, and Skye is suddenly, happily surprised to discover a feeling that feels like love. They spend six months together, in Amandla's tiny single dorm room at Culver, and Amandla teaches her how to let her guard down, and how to fake competency in the adult world, and how to get in with hacker networks. Skye teaches Amandla how to make shitty peanut butter ramen, and how to play pool, and how Skye likes to be touched. Skye's teaching herself how she likes that, too. She's never known, before. She feels like a person filled up with the world. 

It's only by chance that Skye sees a girl all curves and full red lips and thick-framed glasses, her dark hair tucked into a knit cap, and Skye would never notice the twin gold lovemarks across the lush paleness of one breast if she  _wasn't_ looking, but it feels like punishment when she sees it, because the intertwined diamond pattern is so fucking familiar (although she's used to seeing it in gold and silver) that Skye recognises it immediately. Well, she thinks, that's that, at least her girlfriend - ex-girlfriend - has great taste.

Miles has no mark either, Skye discovers when she's twenty one, and that pleases her. She feels like they're on equal footing. He teaches her his hacking tricks, and she doesn't teach him all of hers, but she gives him enough that it feels like connection. They circle in and out of each other's lives easily enough, and even when she moves from Austin to LA, he has her back enough that she doesn't feel so lonely in her van. She's alone in the world, unmarked, not tied to anyone, but she's making the connections she wants. This is okay, she thinks. This is good.

The sky cracks open over New York, and the world becomes a weirder world, one where aliens exist and men in suits fight them off, and Skye is so intent on the news footage (and scraping whatever  _unofficial_ footage she can find on the web) that she doesn't even notice the faint bruise feeling spreading across her breastbone.

It intensifies, over the next week, until Skye wakes sweating, her skin feeling scratched and tender. She lifts up her shirt, confused.

_Fuck_ , she thinks, presses her fingers to the circular gold mark blooming like a flower, shining bright enough in the dark that it illuminates her skin. Skye can't tell whether it's a shield or a target.


	2. Chapter 2

Gold.  _Gold_. Skye's mark is  _gold_ , and she's twenty fucking five, and how is she supposed to wait another twenty years until her soulmate is an adult? She never wanted this. She never  _wanted_ this. You can ignore soulmarks, she thinks, and pulls her shirt back down, resolves to do just that. Months go by, and Skye's doing great investigative work, publishing more podcasts than ever, and she thinks she might have found an  _actual superhero_ , how cool is that, and then her van door slides open, and some Euro-model puts a bag over her head, and Skye's mark flares warm over her sternum.

_Fuck_ , she thinks, and then _they better not mess up my hair. Or shoot me._

Agent Euro-model is a jerk, and also very obviously not a few-months-old baby, so Skye relaxes. Maybe her mark was just overreacting. That can happen, right? Or it was, like, psychosomatic because these two obviously secret government stooges  _kidnapped her and put a damn bag over her head_. Right. Totally psychosomatic. _  
_

Agent  _Coulson_ , Skye thinks, is interesting, especially when he shoots Euro-model with a truth serum and leaves her to dig out some juicy secret-agent secrets, and she goes on being interested by Agent Coulson as he listens to what she has to say, looks like he's taking her seriously. Then he talks Mike Peterson down with a calm, easy tenderness that leaves Skye feeling breathless and yearning and heartsore, and she thinks, I want this man to treat me this way.

Nobody's  _ever_ treated her that way, not even her best partners. They've loved her, they've been good to her, but nobody's ever looked at her the way she thinks Agent Phil Coulson might. It makes it so, so easy to say yes when he offers her a consulting role, and yeah, she's got the other thing, the reason she wanted to infiltrate SHIELD in the first place, but it's not the reason she says yes.

Coulson goes through an intake interview, and it's more in depth than Skye expects, actually.

"Soulmark?" he asks, after 'next of kin' ("nobody", because Skye's too smart to say  _Miles_ , obviously, but it still stings to admit) and 'nominated off-base residence' ("can you put 'my van'? It's always parked in that alley- oh. Okay. Sure. No fixed residence," she says, and that stings again). Skye just stares blankly for a moment, and Coulson looks up. "Soulmark?" he asks again, and she frowns.

"Isn't that, like, illegal to ask for?" she says, and Coulson raises one eyebrow.

"Not for us," he tells her, "secret shadowy government organization, remember," and Skye bites her lip.

"Yeah," she admits, "one."

"Romantic or platonic?" Coulson continues, ticking the box very neatly, and Skye sighs.

"It's gold," she says, "non-bonded," and Coulson sits back in his chair, regards her with what she thinks might be a little surprise.

"Have you met-" he asks, and she shakes her head.

"They're just a  _baby_ , as far as I can tell. Not interested. Next question?" Coulson moves on, doesn't press, but Skye wonders if it's disappointment she caught briefly in his gaze, or just curiosity.

She wants it to be curiosity. She wants him to want to know about her, maybe. She's walking a fine line, and she's got secrets, so many secrets, but what is it about him that makes her want to lay them all on the table? She won't. She knows how to play this. She's got a task to carry out. _  
_

"What about you?" she asks when they're finished, just blurts it out like she's got no chill whatsoever (she has no chill whatsoever around Coulson, she thinks, and it's very embarrassing) and he looks blank for a second. "A soulmark," she clarifies. "I showed you mine..."

"You didn't, actually," he says, closes her file folder and stands up, buttons his jacket. The intake is clearly over, and Coulson's professionalism is -  _professional_ , Skye thinks, and she's strangely disappointed, lets him catch it in her glance.

 

+

 

"What about you?" Skye asks him so casually, and Coulson feels his heart catch in his chest, because she's young, she's so young, and _radiant_ , and she's just told him she's got a lovemark shining somewhere so hopefully on her skin, and he feels old. He feels like dying.

He shuts it down with his most professionally competent demeanor, ignores Skye's disappointed gaze. He's bringing her in as a consultant, nothing more. It's not the time to get emotional. Sometimes Phil feels like Loki's scepter burned all the emotions out of him, hollowed his heart right out. Other times, worse times, he thinks, no, that happened years before Loki, that happened thanks to decades of being SHIELD's best suit. Whatever. He's got a new heart and a fancy plane. It's enough.

Skye seems determined to crack that professional shell, from the way she pokes at him about Camilla Reyes, and he can't resist, gives her a smirk that's just a little flirtier than it needs to be. She gets flustered; it's adorable.  _She's half your age, Phil_ , he reminds himself, and rolls his eyes at his own pathetic brain. He can't help it, though. Skye's so determined to impress him, and she does, she  _does_ , she volunteers for undercover and plays Ian Quinn so well (and what if she's playing  _him_ , he reminds himself, because she could be, she's a risk, everyone says so).

She's a risk. She's tied by fate to someone else. She's  _half his age_.

He sees the change in her, when she decides she wants in for real, and it floors him. "Phil," she says, pushing him just a little, and it's beautiful. "You value me," she tells him, earnest and nervous, and Coulson thinks,  _fuck, fuck_ , because that's it. He's gone. 

He finds her in the SUV, looking contemplative, and slides into the backseat next to her. They sit in silence for a long moment after their conversation, appreciating the peace, and then he looks over at her again.

"No," he tells her quietly, and Skye's obviously startled, doesn't understand what he means by it. "I don't have a soulmark, no."

"Oh," she says, drops her eyes and then looks up at him again. "I'm sorry. You deserve to."

_I do_ , he thinks,  _I do, I wish I did_ , but he drags himself back from finishing the thought,  _I wish it was you._ Maybe she sees it in his eyes anyway.

A month later, Skye is in Miles Lydon's apartment, and Miles is not even Skye's damn soulmate, Coulson thinks, can't decide if that makes it worse or better. "I'm sorry," she tells him again, and Coulson's never been so grateful that SHIELD carved out all his emotional tells. (They didn't, they didn't at all, he's furious, and he doesn't know whether his fury is all about Skye betraying the  _team_ , and that makes him angrier, angry at Skye and at himself.)

"Maybe I can help," he says in the end, because what else can he say, and the way Skye looks at him, he _knows_ she's a risk. She's a risk to his own neatly compartmentalized self. He gives her the second chance anyway, because they're not tied together by a soulmark or by fate or by the universe's grand designs, but she could be a  _good agent_ and he wants to see what she'll do with it and because he got eight seconds of a second chance.

(The way she looks at him, it's worth it.)


	3. Chapter 3

Coulson never regrets giving Skye a second chance, even as she goes behind his back in the Hub, even as she pushes and pushes and _pushes._ It just makes him want to push back, but he doesn't know which way. 

"Trust the system," he tells her, and her face says plainly she doesn't believe a word of what he's saying. He doesn't know, anymore, whether he believes it himself.

He does know Mike Peterson is setting him up. He saw it in Mike's eyes, the apologetic desperation. It's okay. It's  _okay_. He has a son, and he's doing what he has to, and Coulson  _knows_ it's going to play out the way it does. He lets it happen. It's the only thing he can do.

"I'm sorry," Mike says, and Coulson tries to tell him, with his glance, that it's okay, that Ace is safe, that Coulson signed up for this. Then he's knocked out, and he doesn't know anything for a long time, and when he wakes, it's to memories he thought he could never know. To memories he didn't know he had.

He wants to know, and doesn't want to know, and Raina is so convincing, and he's just so tired, so  _tired_ of not knowing. 

"Dinners at the Richmond," Raina says softly. "She cried, Phil. She cried for weeks," and Coulson thinks of how Audrey's lovemark had almost faded away, a faintly shining reminder of love and grief and loss, and his heart aches all over again that she's had this for a second time, without even a fading mark to remember him by. He has no fading memories of his own brief death, just blankness, and then a painfully too-perfect beach in Tahiti.

He wants to  _know_. If he died, if they brought him back, if they filled him with something he doesn't remember, he _wants to_   _know_. He deserves that much.

He gets in the machine, and it feels like burning cold and blue in his head, memories trembling at the edges. Oh god, it hurts, it hurts so much, and he's beginning to remember, now. It's not a beach, gentle and warm and perfect. It's an operating room, it's a machine in his brain, it's pain and darkness and terror. This isn't eight seconds, or forty seconds. This is  _dying_ , for days on end, being remade by machines, and no wonder he didn't change, no wonder he doesn't have a soulmark after it all, because nothing good can come from this. This is monstrous.

_Let me die_ , he says, and means it.

Skye saves him, floors Raina with a punch that he only hears about later, drags him out of his own memories, and oh, the way she's touching him, clinging to him, this feels like connection. This feels like they should have marks that echo each other, marks that declare what it is they mean to each other, because why else would her tears be on his skin right now. Why would he be breathing her name like it's his tether to the world of the living.

They don't have marks. They aren't connected. Phil knows. He's just an old man who didn't stay dead when he should have, and they've been messing with his head, that's all. 

"Are you sure you're alright?" Skye asks him, her eyes soft. "I heard what you were saying."

"They were just messing with my head," he tells her, and himself, and again, the way she looks at him, she doesn't believe a word of it. It's okay, this time. He doesn't believe himself either.

Later, she walks into his office, her jaw set, stands in front of him like she's been preparing herself for something.

"Were you lying to me?" Skye demands, and Coulson doesn't know what she means. 

"What do you mean?" he deflects, and she shoves her hands in her pockets, shifts uneasily.

"You said you're unmarked. Were you  _lying_." Oh, this is about his soulmark, not about his memories, but he still doesn't understand. Why would he have lied. Why would he have lied to _Skye_ , about _that_.

"No," he says, soft, and sees something in her eyes, in her face, before she looks down, schools her expression to blankness.

"Oh," she says, walks away, and Coulson can't help it.  _If I did, it would be you_ , he thinks, and that's one thing he knows for sure.

 

+

 

Coulson's not lying, not marked, _not lying_ , and Skye doesn't understand any of it. When he'd gone, when he was missing, her mark had  _pulled_ , a flare of pain and urgency that had driven her faster, harder.  _Find him_ , her mind had whispered over and over, and Skye had pressed her fingers to her breastbone, taken a deep breath, and found him. She doesn't understand how they're not connected. She doesn't understand how Phil Coulson doesn't have a mark shining bright somewhere on him, something that will make it okay for her to do what she wanted to do so badly. She'd kissed his knuckles anyway, grabbed his hand and held it against her face, cried into him, and if her tears are the only mark on his skin, that will have to be enough.

She has another link she can't fight, now, a connection she doesn't want to break. A SHIELD agent dropped her at the orphanage, and maybe it's family. Maybe it's the belonging she was out in the world searching for. She tries not to hope, but she does. She hopes. She wants this, bad, and she knows it's going to hurt harder, but she can't help it. She  _wants this_.

Coulson looks at her sometimes when he doesn't think she can see, and she doesn't know what his face is saying.

At the SHIELD Academy, when the storm's blown out and everything's quiet, he finds her, and tells her the story that she knew was coming, the story that would just make it hurt harder. Not her mother. A SHIELD agent murdered. A village destroyed. SHIELD's protocol, the orphanage moving her from family to family for her own protection. It hurts, it hurts like a kick, but Skye sees the shape behind the words, the new beginning of the story. This isn't the belonging she was searching for, but SHIELD guarding her, keeping her safe from whatever is out there, it's the belonging she's always had. 

She cries, and Coulson presses his hand to her cheek, wipes away her tear with his thumb. Her mark flares again, warm and protective and confusing as hell, and god, Skye wants this, _bad_. Her tears on his skin, it's not nearly enough.  _Why isn't it you_ , she wonders, and doesn't understand how it's not.

She doesn't see it coming when Ian Quinn shoots her. She's just  _confused_ , at first, doesn't understand, because her mark's not a year old, and why would it have appeared only for her to lose it like this? She never wanted to fight fate, but this, this is cruel.  _No_ , she thinks, she  _wants_ this connection, she wants to claw her way out of death and hold on and fight back. Somewhere someone's mark must be flaring in pain, and Skye's never even met them, and losing that, it's worse than never hoping to start with. 

It hurts. It hurts so bad, it hurts more than she thinks it could, and then it doesn't hurt at all, and that's worse. That's cold.

Coulson finds her when she's right on the edge, and she can't feel much, but she thinks, her blood is on his skin too, now, and it's still not a soulmark, but he's not unmarked by her, and maybe that's enough.


	4. Chapter 4

Skye's dying, Skye's  _dying_ , and Coulson doesn't know what to do. His hands flutter uselessly as he clutches at her, and he hears himself:  _oh no, no, oh god no._ He pulls her into his arms, feels for a pulse that's not there, and everything hurts, everything  _hurts_ , it's like he has a stitch deep in his side. _  
_

They get her into the hyperbaric chamber, and she's too still for too long. Her chest isn't moving. She's gone, he thinks, she can't be. When she sighs out that little puff of air, it's like she's breathing with his lungs.

He's got her blood on him, dark on his skin, and wishes he'd never wished it was Skye, because this kind of mark, he never wanted this. The chamber isn't saving her. It's just prolonging the agony, drawing it out, and Coulson thinks about dying for days on end. Skye deserves more than eight seconds of a second chance. Skye deserves every minute, every hour, every day, of the second chance he got, and he doesn't know how to give it to her, and then he does.

The files are lying. The doctors are lying. His memories are lying.

He doesn't know how to save her, and he knows he should know, and they're running out of time. She's running out of time.  


The potential serum, the GH-325, the Guest House, he clutches at it with desperate fingers, flies the Bus there, takes the team into what he knows will be a hostile situation. The mountain could collapse on them all, he thinks, and if Skye didn't make it, he'd have no regrets. 

They find the serum -  _Fitz_ finds the serum - and then. And then. Coulson finds everything worse. Coulson finds TAHITI, and he thought he knew, he thought he knew already the scale of its monstrosity. It turns out he didn't know at all. It turns out it was worse.

Everything hurts,  _everything hurts_ , and Coulson knows they weren't just messing with his head at all.

"Don't give it to her!" he's shouting, "don't give it to her!" but the serum's in the needle now and it's in Skye's blood, and Jemma looks up at him, her eyes wide with panic.

"She was coding," she says, "sir, she was dead on the table, what harm can it do?"

Skye's heartbeat returns, a steady and even beat, and for just a moment, Coulson thinks, perhaps it won't do any harm. Perhaps it's not as terrible as he thinks. And then her back arches in a seizure, her heart spiking loud and fast, and he can feel the pain again, the burn of a stitch under his ribs. He reaches out, grabs for any part of her he can touch - her foot, under the blankets, the slenderness of her ankle. Wills her to breathe. 

When she does, when she slumps back into the bed, when everything stabilizes, he wants to hope. 

His ribs still hurt, a bruise that aches like he was caught by a bullet glancing off Kevlar, and hours, hours later, when he peels his shirt off, glances down, it's to a gold mark just where two bullet holes sit in Skye's side.

_Oh_ , he thinks,  _oh no_ , because this is Skye being remade, this is Skye dying, this is regeneration of a kind he doesn't understand. This is proof that the GH-325  _did something_ beyond just repair broken cells. This was never the kind of connection he wished for, but he should have known this was how they'd be linked together all along.

 

 

+

 

 

Skye's still recovering, and she's bored, she's so bored, but she can tell, already, that something's up with Coulson. The way he looks at her, his long absences: she's not an  _idiot._ Something's wrong, and it's her.

She waits and waits, watches the way Jemma draws more blood, runs tests she doesn't know the reasons for, and that adds up, too. Whatever it was they gave her, whatever it was that brought her back, it's bad, maybe. She's alive. It can't be that terrible. She remembers hearing Coulson's voice, the way he pleaded with her to stay with him, and he's not even there, but her soulmark tugs again just at the memory, a gentle little pulse like a heartbeat.

Finally, finally, he comes in, and the way he looks at her, still, lets her know whatever he's going to say, it's bad.

She's not expecting  _aliens._

"I was too late," he says, "I'm so sorry, Skye," and she can't even believe he's  _apologizing._ He saved her life, and isn't that what matters? That she's alive? She knows desperation. She knows the way Phil Coulson was desperate to save her.

It's exactly the same way she was desperate to save him, and he doesn't even have an errant soulmark pulling him onward.

"At least we're in the dark together," she tells him, presses her fingers hard against her chest without even realizing she's doing it, and the connection, whatever it is between them, it hums like it's content.

She'd ask him again if he were lying, if there were still anything he was holding back, but the look in his eyes, the way he's gazing at her like she's some small miracle, she can't bear to push him again on whatever it is he's still not telling her.

Perhaps she just doesn't want to hear him say no a third time, she thinks, and lets her mark flare with warmth anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> hello this is my descent into major #TropeFest2k15 stuff but also THESE BEAUTIFUL ORPHAN FEELINGS


End file.
